What we’re currently working on

We (ie. core committers and staff at Gitorious AS) have in recent months focused on building a sustainable business around the Gitorious project. We’ve reached a point where we can spend more time on actual Gitorious development again, so expect things to pick up speed this fall.

We’re really excited about the work ahead, and we’d like to share our immediate plans for the Gitorious project. Here’s a brief overview of what we’re doing in the coming weeks and months:

Roadmap

We’ve picked some main areas to focus on in the near future:

UI overhaul

As referenced in Christian’s recent update, we’re revamping the Gitorious web frontend. This will make Gitorious even nicer to use for you, and much easier to extend and improve for us. Christian has finished up the first round of prototyping, and has started work on the new code browser. He will be pushing code to gitorious.org soon, and blog posts will follow.

Way, way simplified installation of Gitorious

Gitorious can be customized to fit many different environments and scenarios: there’s a lot of parts you can tweak and customize. The flipside is that getting a basic, stock installation of Gitorious running can be very challenging as there’s quite a bit of accidental complexity. You really shouldn’t have to know Ruby on Rails or be a sysadmin just to get Gitorious running.

So, we’re going to fix that. I’m currently working on a very user-friendly installer which makes it a snap to set up a basic Gitorious instance. We’re also creating a freely available, pre-built Virtual Appliance distribution, based on the same installer.

Gitorious.org scaling

Marius is working on performance improvements for the gitorious.org site. We’re moving the .org site to new infrastructure soon. We’ll also look find ways to make Gitorious more horizontally scalable, and the resulting improvements in the code will of course find their way back into the mainline branch and your own standalone installations.

Official documentation

Up till now, Gitorious adopters have had to hunt through (sometimes outdated and conflicting) wiki pages and google group answers for documentation. We’re going to remedy the situation by collecting and updating our documentation in a central location. The documentation effort will be a gradual process over the coming months, and we’ll let you know (and ask for feedback) whenever new or improved material is made available.

Update to Rails 2.3.11+

Under the covers, Gitorious is running on an older version of Rails – the 2.3.x branch. We’re going to upgrade to the newest version of the Rails 2.3 this fall/winter. We have not yet decided what our long-term goals are in this respect. Fow now we are not prioritizing upgrading Rails to version 3, as it is a costly job whose payoff is not immediately clear or convincing to us.

Continuous work on bugs and merge requests

We’re finally able to dedicate more time to work on bug tickets and incoming merge requests, and we’re currently steadily working our way through the backlog.

Please send us your bug reports at our issue tracker, and merge requests on the mainline branch. We’re going to be as responsive as we can, depending on our workload from week to week.

Keeping you in the loop

Finally, we’re also going to post regular blog updates about new (and old!) features, upcoming improvements and the general progress of the project. In other words: stay tuned, because things are rolling now!

I’m not sure a missing issue tracker is “the biggest reason people don’t use Gitorious”, but it sure is something we’ll be looking into down the line. Currently we’re confident that the things we are now working with are the most important at this point.

Please reconsider the jump to Rails 3.0. Running Rails 2.3.11+ on Ruby 1.9.2+ is troublesome at best. Ruby 1.8.7 runs 2.3 just fine, but the days of Ruby 1.8.7 are very limited. Normal maintenance releases ended 3 months ago and emergency security fixes end in June 2013. I would hate for you to do all of this work and be stuck on technology that won’t help people to stay current and make your product seem old before it gets out of the gate.

@joevano We’ve not decided never to adopt Rails 3. We’re not prioritizing it at this point.

We will keep focusing on isolating the various components of Gitorious such that over time we become less coupled to Rails than we are now. This will ease upgrades – or, if we decide to, help us move off of Rails.